"Poverty, the Pope and Mr. Piketty" Jagdish Bhagwati

23.06.2015 | 18:00 - 20:00

The lecture "Poverty, the Pope and Mr. Piketty" by Prof. Jagdish Bhagwati (Columbia University) will be held at the John F. Kennedy Institute in cooperation with the American Academy in Berlin as a Richard von Weizsäcker Lecture.

Jagdish Bhagwati is professor for economics and law at the University of Columbia and holds an honorary doctorate of the Freie Universität’s School of Business and Economics.

In recent years, the Occupy Movement has focused our attention on the richest one percent. That, though, hasn’t helped the poor, argues Jagdish Bhagwati. In his lecture Poverty, the Pope and Mr. Piketty on June 23 he will welcome Pope Francis’ recent efforts to return the poor to the center of the debate. But he questions whether the Pope’s recipes for poverty reduction are appropriate, drawing as they do on unsuccessful lessons from Peronist Argentina rather on decades of successful poverty reduction policies. Bhagwati will also call into question Thomas Piketty’s arguments pertaining to growing wealth inequality.